First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.

I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.

Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is—or was—independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.

The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy—and corrupted the nation’s politics—during the First Gilded Age.

These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations. But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.

Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.

That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people—and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.

We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.

Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

Hence, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

The ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Monday marked the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.

Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.

But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent........

© Common Dreams